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Friday, July 7, 2017

Rival Standards of Testing in Medical Research Gary North from Specific Answers

Rival Standards of Testing in Medical Research

Gary North - July 06, 2017

There are lots of debates between what is called
establishment medicine and alternative medicine. They have very
different strategies in conducting research. Their standards of proof
are different.DOUBLE BLIND AND MORALLY BLIND
Establishment
medicine relies heavily on what are called double-blind tests. These
tests are subject to statistical analysis. But there is a fundamental
moral problem with these tests. That problem is the placebo.
The
tests have randomness as the criterion of truth. If a particular
procedure is going to be proven to be both a safe and effective, it has
to be compared with something. It does no good to compare it with a
procedure known to be dangerous. Nobody is going to be allowed to
conduct an experiment based on a dangerous procedure. Anyway, not many
experiments will be allowed to be conducted this way.
So, what is
the standard? The standard is randomness. Randomness is assumed to be
the result of the placebo. The placebo may work in some cases, but if
the study is detailed, and in some way is corrected for the famous
placebo effect, then the outcome should be random. Some people get
better. Some people will say the same. Some people will get worse. There
will be no pattern to these three outcomes. In other words, they will
be random.
Because conventional medicine establishes randomness as
the criterion of truth, it is forced to conduct large-scale tests in
order to demonstrate effectiveness and safety, based on the law of large
numbers. A new procedure or drug will have winners and losers, but the
people running the experiment want to be able to show that the winners
outnumber the losers in a statistically significant way. Statistically
significant means compared to randomness.
This means that, in
order for conventional medicine to make breakthroughs, at least half of
the people who are given access to the experimental procedure will not
be helped. Well, maybe because of the placebo effect they will be
helped. But they will not be statistically helped. This means that the
person who designs the test has sacrificed the health of half the people
in the experiment. The person conducting the test knows that some
procedure is better than the placebo. If this were not true, then all of
medicine is a gigantic hoax. But the person running the experiment
decides in advance that half the people involved in the experiment will
be abandoned to randomness.
Alternative medicine operates
differently. Alternative medicine takes in people who generally are at
wits end. Everything conventional has failed them, and now they want to
get well. So, statistically speaking, alternative medicine does not deal
with people who are coming in off the street in a random way.
Alternative medicine is conducted by practitioners whose patients are at
a dead end. Their concept of proof is that more people are healed than
would've been the case, had the person never walked in the door. The
alternative medicine practitioner can then point to the decisions of
conventional practitioners. Conventional practitioners had written off
these people.
These people have adopted the line I first heard from Murray Rothbard: "When they tell me I'm terminal, I'll look for a quack."
The
alternative practitioner does not use randomness as the criterion
against which his procedure will be tested. He is using death. For
certain kinds of diseases, the outcome of victims at a particular stage
is known quite well. For example, people who are in stage IV prostate
cancer are dead men walking. In five years, 97% of them will have died.
In one year, over half of them will have died.
Practitioners are well aware of these statistics. So, the alternative
practitioner whose patients come in the door in stage IV is proud of a
survival rate above 10% five years later. He sees this as evidence of a
successful protocol.
Conventional practitioners deny the
legitimacy of this claim. Why? Because it is not justified by a
double-blind test. But alternative practitioners do not accept the
legitimacy of the double-blind test because it condemns half the people
who come in the door to death. Well, not quite, but close to it. It goes
to the Hippocratic oath: do no harm. If you give somebody a placebo,
and you think that there is a treatment that offers greater chance of
recovery than a placebo, then you are doing harm.
If a
practitioner thinks the placebo recipients are all terminal, and he
tells all the participants that they are terminal, fine. But he must
not lie. To conduct the test, he must tell them all that they are
terminal, and he must believe this. "Nothing else will save your life."
There is no way around this conflict of criteria. It will mark the debates that go on in five years, 10 years, or a century.APPLES AND ORANGES
There is another crucial distinction. This has to do with nutritional supplements.
Conventional
medicine wants rigorous tests. To get these tests, conventional
medicine demands that the tests compare apples with apples. But there
are sometimes considerable differences between supplements that are
derived from nature and supplements that are derived from chemistry.
Most
of the nutrition industry believes that there are significant
differences between natural supplements and synthetic supplements in
terms of providing physical benefits. An endless debate goes on with
respect to vitamin E. Those who favor natural vitamin E argue that the
synthetic version does not have the same kind of healing power. The
people running the tests for peer-reviewed journals dismiss this as
irrelevant. They don't think it is possible to run statistically
relevant tests between two or more different kinds of vitamin E.
There
is no great debate with respect to vitamin C. Ascorbic acid is the
synthetic version, and most people who take vitamin C supplements are
content with ascorbic acid. I have used ascorbic acid for years. I
bought 10,000 grams of it back around 1974, and I still have 1,500 grams
left. The benefits that I hoped I would get from vitamin C I have been
able to get with ascorbic acid. My friend Arthur Robinson was the man
who did the actual research for Linus Pauling on vitamin C. He used
ascorbic acid. In fact, he used the same brand that I do because he was
the person who tipped me off to a tremendous sale the company was
running for decades ago. I loaded up.
Side note: Robinson
discovered that Pauling was wrong about vitamin C and cancer. He
discovered that Pauling's claims could not be supported scientifically.
Pauling then suppressed Robinson's findings. He had a right to do this
since his institute owned the research. But he got arrogant. He fired
Robinson. Robinson and his wife taught themselves law in 30 days, and
they defeated a team of lawyers that Pauling had assembled to justify
his violation of Robinson's contract. Robinson got a large settlement
from Pauling's institute.CONCLUSION
These two
glaring contrasts of methodology separate alternative medicine from
conventional medicine. I don't see any way to heal the breach. This is
why we go by faith when we select any healing procedure. The natural
supplement people don't agree with each other, and they are matched by
the conventional practitioners who don't agree with each other.
I
don't say this is a crap shoot. Crap shoots are governed by the law of
large numbers. In selecting a medical procedure for a life-and-death
affliction, the stakes are higher, and the outcomes are far more
uncertain. Crap shoots would be a welcome improvement.